`Powerful' Hurricane Earl Puts East Coast on Alert
Hurricane Earl
NOAA via Getty Images
In this handout satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hurricane Earl, left, moves north-northwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico with the with Tropical Storm Fiona forming behind on Aug. 31, 2010 in the Atlantic Ocean as seen from space.
In this handout satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hurricane Earl, left, moves north-northwest of San Juan, Puerto Rico with the with Tropical Storm Fiona forming behind on Aug. 31, 2010 in the Atlantic Ocean as seen from space. Source: NOAA via Getty Images
Emergency agencies along the Eastern Seaboard are preparing for the arrival of Hurricane Earl, which threatens to graze North Carolina and lash coastal Massachusetts with wind and rain before going ashore in Nova Scotia.
Evacuations may be needed if the storm doesn’t turn north, Craig Fugate, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, said in a conference call today. While Earl isn’t expected to make landfall in the U.S., even a small jog to the west from its current track will have an impact on the mid-Atlantic states, said Bill Read, director of the National Hurricane Center.
Earl, a Category 4 storm, or the second-strongest on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, is on a path that would take it just past North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras early Sept. 3 and then on toward Nantucket and Cape Cod in Massachusetts later that day, according to the center. The storm “will likely cause millions of dollars in beach erosion damage,” Jeff Masters, co- founder of Weather Underground Inc., said in his blog.
“The next few days are going to be very stressful for people on the East Coast from Hatteras to Boston,” said Jim Rouiller, senior energy meteorologist at commercial forecaster Planalytics Inc. “The tracking models are fairly clustered together but there are enough errors built in where you can be off by 50 to 200 miles.”
Hatteras-Bound
Earl was 1,040 miles south-southeast of Cape Hatteras with maximum winds of 135 miles per hour (217 kilometers per hour) and moving west-northwest at 14 mph, according to a center advisory released at 2 p.m. Miami time.
The U.S. Coast Guard has put shipping in Norfolk, Virginia, on notice and the National Hurricane Center says it may issue hurricane watches along the mid-Atlantic coast later today.
“Residents and tourists anywhere from North Carolina up to New England should keep track of this storm,” Robbie Berg, a hurricane specialist at the center, said today in a telephone interview from Miami. “It’s too early to tell what kind of impact will occur.”
Evacuation decisions are made at the state and local level, not by FEMA, Fugate said, adding the federal agency was speaking out to make sure people are prepared right away.
“We’ve actually had people moving from the West Coast to the East Coast to have enough teams to cover all the states, because this storm is going to parallel the coast and we want to have people ready to go in each of the states if there is a request,” he said.
Strike Odds
The chances are 10 percent that the U.S. will experience hurricane-force winds of at least 74 mph in the next three days, according to Tropical Storm Risk, a London-based venture that grew out of a U.K. government-supported tsunami initiative.
TSR puts the possibility of tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph at 60 percent in the same time period. Both Cape Hatteras and Chatham, Massachusetts, have a 10 percent risk of hurricane-force winds.
Providence, Rhode Island, and Montauk, New York, have a 35 percent chance of experiencing tropical storm-force winds within the next four days, TSR said in a statement today.
“People only have two or three days to prepare,” said Rouiller. “We can get some power outages in Massachusetts up through Halifax.”
Massachusetts Impact
Cape Cod and Nantucket island are likely to receive the highest wind gusts from Earl, said Meredith Croke, a meteorologist with AirDat LLC in North Carolina, which installs weather-gathering sensors on commercial aircraft.
“Long Island is tucked in a little more so it will be better for that region,” she said.
The waters off the mid-Atlantic U.S. are exceptionally warm right now, which will allow the storm to grow more intense and stay that way longer as it journeys north, Masters said by telephone. The water was 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in July, the highest on record going back to 1875, he said.
The good news for the East Coast is the storm’s weak side will be facing populated areas and its strong side will be far into the Atlantic, Masters said. Hurricanes spin counter- clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, so the top right quadrant or northeastern side contains the most powerful winds.
“It’s a full category less on the left side of the storm,” Masters said.
Canada Landfall
The current track shows the storm going ashore near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, on the morning of Sept. 4, Chris Fogarty, program supervisor for the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
“It looks like a 75 to 80 percent chance decent winds will move into some part of Nova Scotia,” Fogarty said. “The big question is, will it be hurricane strength when it arrives here.”
Earl is being followed across the Atlantic by Tropical Storm Fiona, which formed yesterday and remained a “weak” system today with sustained winds of 40 mph, the hurricane center said.
Fiona is 335 miles east of the Leeward Islands heading west-northwest at 24 mph, the center said at 2 p.m. Miami time. The storm is predicted to pass to the northeast on a course between Bermuda and the U.S. East Coast. A hit on Bermuda remains a possibility, graphics on the center’s website show.
Fiona’s Path
Earl may keep Fiona from strengthening, according to Allan Huffman, also an AirDat meteorologist.
“The problem with Fiona is that it is so close to Earl,” Huffman said. “If there is a stronger storm at the front, it will have an adverse impact on the one behind it.”
Earl has already caused damage to some of the islands of the Caribbean, blowing the roofs off of buildings in Anguilla and destroying at least one home in Antigua, according to an e- mailed report by Caribbean Risk Managers Ltd. Flooding also occurred on Antigua and 350 people were forced into shelters, according to the risk management company, based on Castries, Saint Lucia.
Tropical storm watches, which indicate such conditions are expected within two days, were issued today for Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Anguilla, Saba and St. Eustatius. A tropical storm warning is in place for St. Martin and St. Barthelemy.
Caribbean Warnings
Tropical storm warnings were lifted for U.S. and British Virgin Islands after Earl passed, along with Puerto Rico, where some 200,000 customers were without power and a half-dozen flights to the U.S. mainland were canceled. The Turks and Caicos remain under a tropical-storm warning while the southeastern Bahamas are under a watch.
Forecasters are now watching another area of disturbed weather off the coast of Africa that has a 10 percent chance of becoming a storm in the next two days.
Rouiller said satellite images show other systems stacked up over Africa ready to move to sea.
“Clear across Africa they are lined up, there is a conveyor belt and we don’t see an end to it,” Rouiller said. “We could be in this for a while.”
Masters said the steering pattern that has deflected Danielle and may also send Earl and Fiona away from the East Coast is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
To contact the reporters on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net; Alex Morales in London at amorales2@bloomberg.net
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